Richard P. Feynman Quotes

A one-size-fits-all lecture is not the way to go about education.

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.

The ideal direction is using something like Khan Academy for every student to work at their own pace, to master concepts before moving on, and then the teacher using Khan Academy as a tool so that you can have a room of 20 or 30 kids all working on different things, but you can still kind of administrate that chaos.

Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind and the subject matter.

The secret of sound education is to get each pupil to learn for himself, instead of instructing him by driving knowledge into him on a stereotyped system.

There are amazing teachers, but the system doesn't always allow them to address the individual needs of a child.

If I can get them to think, get them to feel, get them to see, then I've done about all that I can as a teacher.

Mentoring is a mutuality that requires more than meeting the right teacher: the teacher must meet the right student.

The trend of offering individualized education plans, curricula, and lessons is going to help students tremendously. “Teaching to the middle” is one of the saddest concepts I've ever heard about.

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.

Teaching, therefore, asks first of all the creation of a space where students and teachers can enter into a fearless communication with each other and allow their respective life experiences to be their primary and most valuable source of growth and maturation. It asks for a mutual trust in which those who teach and those who want to learn can become present to each other, not as opponents, but as those who share in the same struggle and search for the same truth.

I believe in teaching just a few students, as teaching requires a constant alert observation on each individual in order to establish a direct relationship. A good teacher cannot be fixed in a routine, and many are just that. During teaching, each moment requires a sensitive mind that is constantly changing and constantly adapting.

Active learning is always involved with interaction between teachers and students and Socratic methods and that's gonna continue.

We need more concept-development and active involvement, less tuning forks, pulleys, and friction formulas - students know they'll never use those. They need more study of outer space and DNA. They need more exciting teaching, more fair-minded encouragement, more career guidance, more mentorship. Both students and teachers need more feedback. It would help if we stopped protecting bad teachers - It's very difficult to get rid of even sexual perverts let alone just bad teachers.

We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.

The best educators are the ones that inspire their students. That inspiration comes from a passion that teachers have for the subject they're teaching. Most commonly, that person spent their lives studying that subject, and they bring an infectious enthusiasm to the audience.

Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.

A teacher who can show good, or indeed astounding results while he is teaching, is still not on that account a good teacher, for it may be that, while his pupils are under his immediate influence, he raises them to a level which is not natural to them, without developing their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again once the teacher leaves the schoolroom.

A teacher can do very little for a pupil and should only be thankful if he don't hinder him, and the greater the master, mostly the less he can say.

In every story I have heard, good teachers share one trait: a strong sense of personal identity infuses their work.

Instead of trying to educate the human race, they should imitate the pedagogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who concentrated their efforts on the education of a single person.

I think we're all experiencing climate change. Experience is an effective teacher. It's sometimes a very harsh teacher. So we will be taught about climate change.

I think there are school teachers who are on the exact same mission as me.

If I were a physics teacher or a science teacher, it'd be on my mind all the time as how the hell we really got this way. It's a perfectly natural human thought and, okay, if you go into the science class you can't think this. Well, alright, as soon as you leave you can start thinking about it again without giving aid and comfort to the lunatic fringe of the Christian religion.

Learning is a process of mutual discovery for teacher and pupil. Keep an open mind to their unexpected responses.